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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25507414">i couldn’t get the boy to kill me (but i wore his jacket for the longest time)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaer/pseuds/seaer'>seaer</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Fix-It of Sorts, Gerry Lives, M/M, Resurrection, Slow Dancing, chekhov’s record player, neither edited nor beta read because i fear no god, romance is dead and his name is oliver banks, subtextually gay games of pool</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 05:14:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>9,961</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25507414</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaer/pseuds/seaer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Even longer before, he’d had a different fire burning up inside him, scourging the slow roast of his teen-hood. No outlet for his lighthouse of anger other than movement, action, Leitner after Leitner until he found the real thing and made a red well of his face. This, he thinks, is neither.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Oliver Banks/Gerard Keay</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>74</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>155</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>We pull our boots on with both hands<br/>but we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do<br/>is stand on the curb and say <i>Sorry<br/>about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.</i><br/>I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.<br/>— Little Beast, Richard Siken</p><p>++ cw for like. suicidal ideation sorta because gerry is Tired</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When he starts to end, it’s slow—hot and unmistakable. In his muted awareness of ink and foxing he doesn’t have the strength to cry out, can’t rouse enough false life to be surprised. Just lets it happen. Warmth touches the edges of him, and he turns, curls, thinking, <i>Finally, finally, finally</i>.</p><p>An eternity ago he’d tasted the fire of the Desolation. Like an epicure the lightless flame had put him in its mouth and burned around everything else with a surgical, ruthless precision, hurt him around the talisman of his every joint. It had even left the wool of his suit pristine. (They’d had to cut it off him. It hadn’t mattered.) Even longer before, he’d had a different fire burning up inside him, scourging the slow roast of his teen-hood. No outlet for his lighthouse of anger other than movement, action, Leitner after Leitner until he found the real thing and made a red well of his face. This, he thinks, is neither.</p><p>It‘s not without light, but not without pain. Small miracle: conclusion. If he could gasp unsummoned, he would, and if he could laugh, he’d probably crack a rib in delight. Instead he burns. Gerard isn’t sure if he fades, or grows faint with heat, or simply is less and less until he isn’t anymore. Maybe all at once. What he knows in stark, terminal relief, is his last moments, the peace of them, then; the silent, rightful void of an end.</p><p>.</p><p>Gerard Keay opens his eyes.</p><p>He’s sitting cross-legged on a cold floor, hands laced together in his lap like in prayer. Far off he can hear the quiet conversation of a TV, but it’s nowhere in sight, the room bare other than the charcoal-coloured coils that meander across its floor. He lifts his head to trace their length with his eyes. They stretch to the end of the space, to where the floor drops off into open air, pooling together around a shape dressed in black.</p><p>The man is turned away from Gerry, looking outwards. Gerry is suddenly aware of the devastating fact that he is not, actually, dead.</p><p>“Fuck me,” he groans a little too loudly. The man in black startles, nearly drops the plastic cup in his hand, but fumbles for it and catches it just in time. Gerry struggles to his feet, head full of static, and storms right for him, careless of the black tendrils underfoot.</p><p>By the time he reaches, the man has composed himself and turned to receive him, one knee drawn up. He’s a little wide-eyed, hand on his forehead in a way that makes his short locs stand up. “Um.” </p><p>“What is this?” Gerry demands. Then, to the air around them, incredulous: “Are you actually serious?” It comes with a sardonic huff of a laugh.</p><p>“No, I—Gerard, right?” says the man. It’s his turn to laugh, nervously, dragging his hand over his head. “I didn’t think he could actually go through with it,” he adds, more to himself than to Gerry. Gerry squints and realises that the man is holding an empty cup of yoghurt. </p><p>“He’s no coward,” Gerry says tentatively.</p><p>“No,” the man agrees. He gets to his feet with a strange grace. “Do you know who I am, Gerard?”</p><p>Gerry doesn’t, not really, but he can wager a pretty good guess. “Terminus. The coroner.” The last two words leave his mouth tonelessly, and he wonders if even now, in this liminal alcove, some part of him hasn’t yet shed the Watcher’s blessing.</p><p>“In part.” The man transfers his cup of yoghurt to his non-master hand and extends his right  for Gerry to shake. “Oliv-<i>Ant</i>—O-Oliver. Banks.” </p><p>Gerry accepts it and shakes, once, firm. “Okay, now, Oliver, can you please tell me,” he says, half-desperate, grip on Oliver’s hand vicelike. “Why am I not dead?” </p><p>“You are,” answers Oliver blithely. Gerard doesn’t remember loosening his grip, but he must have, because Oliver slips his hand out of it to splay his fingers flat on Gerry’s sternum, palm flush with fabric. Gerry’s senses rise alert to the stillness of his own chest. The wrongness of a heart that wouldn’t deign to beat. The ungodly pain of being bound to the catalogue is gone, lifted like a burden of Atlas, but he is undeniably still <i>here</i>. “Have been for a long time.”</p><p>“I know.” Gerry shoves his hands into the pockets of his coat as Oliver drops his to his side. “Don’t need you to tell me that. Why hasn’t it <i>ended</i>?”</p><p>Oliver gestures to the side with a tilt of his head. “Terminus is...fickle. Especially with those who leave its catalogue. It’s not every day that a page burns.” He clears his throat. “What I’m saying is, I really don’t know.”</p><p>“Come on,” Gerry gripes. “Christ. Is there a, I don’t know, a hotline I can complain to?”</p><p>“I think I’m the closest thing you can get to a hotline, Gerard. Can I call you Gerry?” Oliver asks, like an afterthought.</p><p>“Yes,” Gerry says hotly. “Tell you what, I know how this can go. I challenge you to a game. And if I win, you quit bantering me and let me <i>die</i>.” </p><p>Oliver snorts, a sound a little at odds with the dour lines of his face. “Bantering you? Gerry, this isn’t Love Island.”</p><p>“I don’t know what that is.”</p><p>“Oh. Oh,” Oliver says, before falling silent. Again, his countenance goes grim, furrow between his eyebrows like a theatre mask for a Greek tragedy. “Right. A game.”</p><p>“A game,” Gerry echoes.</p><p>“You have anything in mind?” Oliver asks, unfailingly polite. Gerry isn’t stupid—knows the games he should pick, understands his odds. If he were a wiser man he’d say blackjack, or, if he wanted to get sexy, Russian roulette. Instead he raises his shoulders in a shrug. </p><p>By now he is sure that some aspect of the Beholding remains with him, that perennial curiosity. “You can choose,” he tells Oliver.</p><p>With a thoughtful <i>hmm</i>, Oliver stretches his empty hand outward. At once two bone-white cue sticks appear, and he passes one to Gerry, who takes it with two hands, testing its weight. He gets the weary feeling that he has made quite grievous a mistake. </p><p>Oliver brushes past him. When Gerry turns to follow, the room beyond is different, the air colder, walls darker. He looks back over his shoulder and the ledge that Oliver sat on is gone, replaced by another wall, this one with a inked supernova of a painting hung up for decoration. This, Gerry must admit, is quite the gimmick, even by entity standards. He props the cue stick on his shoulder and trails after Oliver into the heart of the End’s lounge. Their footsteps echo on the black marble.</p><p>The paintings follow them in, Gerry’s eyes glancing across triptychs of rootlike abstracts. He wonders if they’re real. If someone, somewhere, is deep in the grip of Death’s power, and all they’re compelled to do is paint bland wall decor for whatever pocket dimension any avatar of the end so desires. He supposes it’s not that bad a gig.</p><p>There are other people, too, and Gerry realises this first when he walks right into one. The contact is jarring, but barely tangible, like colliding with a beaded curtain. When he looks up he’s face to face with a blurred apparition of a person, its features smudged as if wrought from lines of charcoal. He watches as its suggestion of a mouth parts in an apology. Unnerved, he steps sideways and quickens his pace to fall in step with Oliver. Around them the stage props of people move in their own spectral trajectories.</p><p>“What is this place?” Gerry asks, less to get an answer and more to fill the space between him and Oliver. “Is it...real?”</p><p>“Real as they come,” says Oliver with a quirk of the corner of his mouth that tells Gerry he takes great pleasure in being coy. If Gerry strains his ears, he can hear the distant melody of a grand piano, though he has the grave certainty that he’s not interested to find out who’s playing it. “If anything, it’s us who aren’t real. For now.”</p><p>“It’s all a little, uh, bourgeois.” </p><p>“I take any chance I can get to indulge.”</p><p>“Spending the End money well?”</p><p>“Oh, I‘m not paying for this.”</p><p>“Hm,” Gerry says. Gently he reaches over to take the empty cup of yoghurt from Oliver’s hand and drops it into the trash as they round the corner. “I thought avatars didn’t eat.”</p><p>Oliver takes a beat to answer. “I don’t need to. Not really. But it’s not like that’s going to stop me from enjoying yoghurt.” Past the corner is a pool table, lacquered over a bleached surface that Gerry Knows is the same bone of the cue sticks. The surface of the table is the same disconcerting pale. Against the moody backdrop of the lounge, it’s a sight; a film photograph overexposed to nothingness. Oliver reaches a hand into the side of the table for the balls and shepherds them into a triangle as coolly as an aristocrat.</p><p>For a man who wasn’t expecting Gerard, Oliver seems incredibly practiced. “You do this kind of thing often? Play death golf with prospective revenants every Sunday?” Gerry asks.</p><p>Oliver turns away so that Gerry only catches the tail end of his smile. “No. This, uh, this is a first. I’m not technically a reaper, you see.” </p><p>“But you’ll play death’s games.”</p><p>“When people like you ask them of me, yes.” He sets his cue stick down on the table, regards Gerry with something akin to amusement. “I’ve never heard of anyone gambling their life on golf.”</p><p>“Why not? Get those old bones in the sunlight. Maybe they disintegrate, and you can keep your life for free.”</p><p>This time, Oliver wheezes an unmistakable laugh. “That’s one game plan. You know,” he says, “golf I’ve never heard of. I have witnessed foosball.”</p><p>“No <i>way</i>.”</p><p>“Yeah. <i>That</i> Death had spent close to six centuries as bones, and not once had it practiced its foosball hand. The gambler won. Unfortunately for them.”</p><p>“Oliver, I’ve changed my mind. I do have a game that I want to play,” Gerry insists jokingly. “Swap this bad boy out for a foosball table and we can get real.”</p><p>Oliver retrieves the cue ball from underneath the table and places it on the white veneer of the surface. “It’s not too late, if you really want.”</p><p>“I’m kidding. Mostly. Billiards works just fine,” says Gerry. “But before we start—I’m just curious. I’d have thought we were on the same side,” he starts. “Or are you planning to beat me in this bet so you can keep me in this...this wretched half-life to feed your patron?”</p><p>“You’ll find it best not to make assumptions about my intentions.” Oliver’s grip tightens almost imperceptibly on the cue ball (but what use is putting your trust in the Beholding if not to perceive the imperceptible?) as he speaks. “Shall we begin? If you need me to take you through the rules, just say so.”</p><p>“No, I’ve played before. Eight-ball, right?” Just once, in a dodgy club in the States. Gertrude had run circles around him, but Oliver doesn’t need to know that. “When I played the balls were numbered. Had their own colours.”</p><p>“That was eight-ball, then,” Oliver says. When Gerry looks again, the plain yellows and reds are gone, the triangular rack holding the numbered set he remembers. “We’ll play that, if you’re not acquainted with blackball.”</p><p>Gerry nods, mystified. “Are you breaking?”</p><p>“Aren’t we all?” Oliver muses melancholically. </p><p>“Ha ha. I mean, are you taking the first shot?”</p><p>“We can flip a coin.”</p><p>“Oh. Oh, no. You can go.”</p><p>“If you say so,” says Oliver. He removes the triangular rack from the table before he angles his cue stick and leans down into it, into the shot, slender brown fingers a careful crutch for its weight. The lounge around them is still for one tenuous second. Then Oliver thrusts, breaks straight-on in one fluid motion, and all fifteen balls scatter like a galaxy being born. A couple sink with a resigned roll. He surveys his handiwork with a calculative eye. “I’ll be doing stripes.”</p><p>In his element, Oliver Banks is at the very least incredibly <i>distracting</i>. It hasn’t escaped Gerry’s notice that the man is handsome, cataclysmically so, solemn and unreachable as a silent movie protagonist. Not that any of it matters. If Gerry is lucky, Oliver is a beautiful thing that Gerry will never have to see again. For now he watches as Oliver pockets a concerning number of striped balls with easy skill. </p><p>Behind him there’s a crush of glass, a brief commotion. Gerry casts a glance over his shoulder but finds nothing amiss. When he looks back, Oliver straightens from his position bent over the table, wearing a blazer that Gerry is pretty sure he hadn’t been wearing seconds ago. It’s cut in sharp lines of black velvet, and Gerry, bewildered, is only dimly aware that his turn has started.</p><p>He lifts his own cue stick and does a passable imitation of Oliver’s stance. The eyes on his knuckles stare back up at him from where they prop up his cue stick, sullenly judgmental. He ignores them and takes his aim. </p><p>When he stands back to watch the blue two-ball sink, Oliver is wearing a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles. “Is this your ultimate avatar ability?” Gerry asks. “Instant wardrobe?”</p><p>“Maybe you’re just unobservant.”</p><p>“Doubt it.” Gerry shows him the back of his tattooed hand like the Eyes are a new wedding ring to flash.</p><p>“Must be nice,” says Oliver wistfully. “To pick your poison.”</p><p>“It really is,” says Gerry. “I can’t ever watch Wimbledon because the Beholding always tells me who wins.” He readies another hit, watching Oliver out the corner of his eye. “Why? You got another evil demon you’re more interested in courting?”</p><p>Oliver matches his scrutiny through the tawny frames of his glasses. “This is going to sound silly, but I’d rather fancy the Vast,” he says after a moment of consideration. “Y’know, wheeeeeee.” He waves the arm not holding his cue stick like he’s on the drop of a rollercoaster.</p><p>Despite himself, Gerry laughs, so genuine that it surprises him when it bubbles out. His shot goes awry. “Oh, fuck it.” He blows a tangled lock of hair out of his face as his target ball bounces against the side of the table, nowhere near any pocket. “It’s you again. Have at thee.” If Oliver’s master plan is to distract him with banter to the point where he loses, Gerry has to admit it’s working.</p><p>Their game lapses into silence. Elsewhere, the piano overture rises like the song is getting closer. For a while the indistinct chatter of patrons severed from sensible time and the occasional impact of Oliver’s cue stick on the white ball are the only sounds between them. Watching Oliver play pool, Gerry thinks, is like watching a force of nature slowed to a precise crawl. </p><p>Oliver is the one to break the silence. Mid-shot, he says, “I know it’s counterproductive, but I feel like there’s some comfort to be had in it,”—he pockets two striped balls in a perfect coup—“The Vast, I mean.“</p><p>Gerry blinks. “I guess rollercoasters aren’t half bad.”</p><p>“I love rollercoasters.” Oliver straightens. “But—when you look up at the sky on a clear night, it’s easy to want to give yourself to something like that.”</p><p>Gerry is silent, briefly. “I haven’t seen the stars in a while.”</p><p>Oliver’s eyes are impossibly sad. <i>With rue my heart is laden</i>, thinks Gerry, and wonders where he read it. “I think,” he starts, “you and I have a lot in common with them.” With a dusting of his jacket he repositions another shot at the cue ball. “Most of them are long-dead. Still shining pinpricks into our vision because time hasn’t caught up with them to let them go.”</p><p>“Are you that? Long-dead?” Sometime in their interaction Gerry must’ve guessed, but he’s seized with the sudden need to hear Oliver’s answer.</p><p>Oliver smiles. Gerry is momentarily transfixed. “I’m a few years post-mortem myself.”</p><p>“How’d you go? If you’re alright with saying.”</p><p>“Satellite debris.”</p><p>“That’s pretty hot.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Oliver takes his shot, but the malachite fourteen stalls just shy of its pocket. “Damn it.” When he looks back up at Gerry, his eyes are gone, sunken, grin full of too many teeth. For a split second, where his face used to be gleams the white of bone. Gerry feels a cold slug of a glacier travel down his spine. Before he can react, Oliver’s face is back, dark and placid as ever.</p><p>Shit, that’s <i>goth</i>, thinks Gerry. He wipes the sweat of his hands on his jeans and takes his turn.</p><p>“What about you?” Oliver asks as Gerry is fidgeting with the position of his cue stick. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”</p><p>“You don’t know already?” says Gerry, curious. “I thought you would. Avatar of the End and all.”</p><p>“I know you didn’t die in London. Which is why I don’t know anything about how.”</p><p>Gerry takes a shot at the red three and misses. “It was in Pittsburgh. A brain tumour.” He frowns at the table. “Kind of funny. That something so mundane could take me before any of Smirke’s fourteen. Well, besides yours, I guess,” he adds. “But that hasn’t technically taken me either. Clearly.”</p><p>“I think it has,” Oliver says. “Not in the way you want. But you’re all tangled up in it already.” He worries at the knot of the tie that Gerry doesn’t remember him putting on, loosens it so the front of his shirt discloses just a hint of collarbone. “I dreamed of you, you know.”</p><p>Gerry can almost feel the caliginous shape of what Oliver is saying, a weight against a door that he doesn’t want to open. Behind him every tendril in every painting surges fuller, twines deeper. He knows the End deals in dreams, has read Dekker’s theories on sleep and death. Two things pulled screaming from the same womb. In another universe, Oliver’s words would be sweet, uncontrived. In this one they are damning.</p><p>“After,” Oliver says by way of elaboration. He bends, takes a shot that frees the cue ball from the impossibility of the position Gerry’s turn had left it in. “I dream of everyone in the catalogue. Doesn’t matter where it’s kept. It’s your turn, by the way.”</p><p>Gerry connects a couple of dots. “That how you knew my name?”</p><p>“I read about your mum.”</p><p>“It wasn’t me.” Gerry tries again with the three, resenting himself for how quickly he says it. Imagines his face on the articles about his mother’s first death, younger, a little bit stupider, eyes wide with the aftermath of the unspeakable. In the mugshot, he remembers, there’d still been blood on his face, a mess of a smear down the side of his cheek where she’d cradled it with her dying hand. They hadn’t let the press have it. For that he is grateful. “What did you even google? List of mutilated corpses, twenty-first century?” He watches the cue ball collide with one of Oliver’s two remaining stripes. Slowly but surely, the red eleven crawls toward the pocket furthest from Gerry and sinks. “Oh, come on.” </p><p>“I figured you didn’t do it—and, uh,” Oliver falters, “I did google something along those lines, yes.” He takes his time with his turn, aims a hit like a marksman looking through a scope. “Are you sure you’ve played pool before, Gerard?”</p><p>“Piss off,” Gerry says. “Tell your entity to build a pool table in its next evil tome and maybe you’ll have higher-quality opponents.”</p><p>Oliver pots his last stripe effortlessly. “I’ll write an email.” There’s no celebration, just a perfunctory removal of his glasses, which he hooks onto his collar. “I’ll be taking that pocket,” he says, indicating the one by Gerry’s hip. </p><p>It’s a little bit like dreaming, watching himself lose. Gerry doesn’t know at all what it means for him. Oliver pots the eight ball in the pocket he selected with a swift stab of his cue stick. Maybe (surely) Gerry was doomed the moment Oliver chose their gamble. Maybe Gerry was doomed when Oliver touched the space over his unbeating heart. But he’s lost, and something he does know, from experience, is that it can always get worse, even if you’re four years dead. He folds his arms against his chest and regards Oliver with his brows drawn together.</p><p>Oliver reaches for the cue ball still on the table and turns to regard him back. Their game over, the enormity of his focus has shifted to Gerry. It would be a little easier, thinks Gerry, if Oliver weren’t so damn gorgeous. He’s not an idiot—it is astoundingly unwise to acquaint yourself with any avatar, no matter whether they’re tall and good at pool and able to make you laugh for the first time in years.</p><p>Faintly Gerry notices that the pianist has ceased its playing. Oliver sets his cue stick down on the table, rounds the corner of it to stand by Gerry. He holds out the hand with the cue ball and instinctively Gerry reaches out to take it from him. His fingers touch the soft heel of Oliver’s palm; Oliver’s his, and Gerry curls his hand around the cue ball just as Oliver releases it. They stay like that for a while, unmoving, sphere of polished bone enclosed in Gerry’s loose fist, Gerry’s fist in turn blanketed snugly in the harbour of Oliver’s slender fingers.</p><p>Oliver says: “I’ll see you again.” He takes his hand off Gerry’s and proceeds into the new silence of the End’s lounge, velvet shoulder bumping Gerry’s leather for just a second. When Gerry turns to watch him go, there’s nothing to watch, just a lounge of ghosts and a black spot in his vision that grows larger, emptier by the second. The ground slips away, and Gerry is out before he can think to scream.</p><p>.</p><p>He comes to just as slowly as he burned, doesn’t open his eyes when he drifts finally into waking. He lies curled into himself, eyes shut, for what feels like both seconds and hours. His chest rises and falls like his lungs never forgot how to keep him alive. If he tries to think, his mind stalls with white noise.</p><p>There’s a chill in the air, the slightest touch of cold that comes with a night not yet descended. He isn’t cold, though, no—he’s been wearing the same leather jacket for a long time, hasn’t been proper cold in ages. He opens his eyes at last to a dimly-lit room, the suspended hour before nightfall. When he props himself up languidly on one of his hands something slips down his body. </p><p>The fabric is soft, blacker than the dusk around it. Gerry squints. With his thumb and index he pinches the velvet of its sleeve, feels the satiny inside of its breast pocket, and makes a face equal parts distressed and fond. </p><p>The apartment is empty save for him. He travels through it trancelike, a calf finding its legs, before he stops to wrestle his boots off and wander its sacred interior in his socks, boots dangling from two of his fingers. Eventually he strips off his own leather coat and wrestles himself out of his clothes until he’s in just his pants, Oliver’s blazer thrown over his shoulders like the world’s most sophisticated superhero cape. It takes him a bit to find the washing machine to bundle his laundry into, and another good ten minutes to get it to start washing.</p><p>Now, he is proper cold, bare skin prickling with the foreignness of it. He feels as though he’s shed some phantom exoskeleton—he gingerly places one hand over where his heart should be and sure enough, with no cloth to keep it quiet, his pulse kicks, once, twice, ceaseless.</p><p>He steps back over the threshold of the kitchen and moves on to the rest of the house. Opens the front door to leave his boots outside on the empty wooden rack by the doormat. Bends to retrieve the bouquet on the doorstep, bruise-coloured calla lilies, hellebores the shade of a starless night wrapped in cellophane (Condolences, says the tag on the bouquet of black flowers. Gerry exhales harder than usual.) Back inside he runs a hand down the linen of the day curtain as hesitantly as he would the blade of a bayonet, the bouquet in his other arm held close to his chest. Pokes his head out the window only to discover he has a window box spilling over with chrysanthemums.</p><p>There’s something weighing the blazer down, and Gerry dips a hand into its pocket and finds the cue ball, round and unassuming. He is an eternity away from knowing what to make of it, so he puts it back where he found it and turns to face the living room. The walls are plain except for one thing. With a start Gerry realises the painting is one of his; the eye from Morden.</p><p>By the time he’s been in all of the rooms, the sun has dropped down the horizon entirely, and night settles with the distant barking of a dog in the street below. If he stands close enough to the front door he can hear people moving in the corridor outside, unintelligible conversations bright with laughter, doors opening and closing after long days of work. It’s enough to intoxicate him, head leaned back to rest on the wall by the doorframe.</p><p>Eventually he gathers himself again and ventures out onto the balcony of the flat. The night is young and lovely and very, very, clear. He shivers a little in its breeze and pulls Oliver’s blazer closer, realises with bemusement that it’s broader in the shoulders than he thought. Looking at the sky, Gerry has the idea that someone has wiped it clean of its old constellations, the ones he might have watched as a kid from the window of Pinhole Books, and sketched new ones in their place. Once he thinks of this it is nearly impossible to look away.</p><p>In the coming days he will trim his own shittily-dyed hair over the bathroom sink. Learn the names of the people living opposite. Fill the fridge with fresh produce and mango-flavoured yoghurt. He will spread a sheet of plastic in the square of sunlight by the sliding door of the balcony, lighten his wallet for cadmiums and cobalts and carmines, tie his hair up, and paint with the feverish certainty of a man twice-dead and not dead at all.</p><p>Tonight he sleeps in the velvet of Oliver’s blazer. The bed is pushed up to a window with a good view of the street. He reaches again for the cue ball like it’s the beacon of a lighthouse and brings it to his lips, presses it adjacent to his heartbeat. Face flushed red in the darkness, he dreams that night and will dream every night after of an Archivist—and a man with a line of worry between his eyebrows who smiles like the impact of a car crash, the contact of his hand on Gerry’s a wound of flammable touch, fingers spread on his chest, palm the center of a universe of irrelevant fear.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>gerry died in like 2014 and love island first season aired in 2015. this is the real tragedy of the magnus archives</p><p>the only pool i have played is the game pigeon 8 ball so i sincerely apologise if all pool descriptions in this fic are absolute nonsense</p><p>also i’m on tumblr @bdhead</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Oliver Banks doesn’t need to sleep anymore, not really.</p><p>It’s kind of handy when he wants to watch the bad reality TV that screens past reasonable hours. Beyond that it just exists as a thing that he doesn’t need to do. Most days he is a marvel of momentum, an automaton ticking steadily along because his entity has decided that he has grown out of nap time since he went and died and graduated from prophet to proper avatar. The End is a conceptual parent who has set him loose from the confines of lights out. So Oliver stays awake. Watches identical blonde social media influencers fall over themselves for television romance (strangely addictive).</p><p>Still, even when physical exhaustion evades him he feels that deeper, middle-of-the-marrow tiredness, like behind the bark the wood of his soul has rotted. Eroded. Gone bad down to the roots. The night after he wins his first game of Death he feels this so powerfully that when he gets back to his apartment he wrestles his tie off, flings himself onto his mattress, and sleeps for two days straight.</p><p>His dreams come in legions. For the first time in years the grove of perennial black tendrils is missing a chrysalis. Oliver stands where the roots used to converge and hopes the man they used to hold never returns. Never walks Oliver’s dreams again. It is a foolish thing to hope for. Outside the morgue of the catalogue, in the real places, the roots twine their usual paths around the dying.</p><p>He’s awoken by his phone, of all things. Whatever monstrosity his phone is crying right now, he is about ninety percent certain it was not his ringtone before today. Did he change it?  He doesn’t remember changing it.</p><p>“Oliver.” the voice on the other end would be familiar if he wasn’t so deeply sleep-addled. “I hear you’ve popped your gamble cherry.”</p><p>Oliver is silent for what feels like a minute. By the time the minute is up he feels real enough to make a guess to who is calling. “Cane?”</p><p>“Does anyone else call you these days?” Through the phone Oliver can hear the croon of jazz music, can almost picture Annabelle twirling the cord of the vintage landline around one finger.</p><p>Oliver grunts vaguely and struggles to sit up, fails. “Why are you calling?” He knows what the Web is like, knows it’s in his best interest to keep the conversation as brief as he can. Annabelle makes a disapproving sound.</p><p>“You don’t need to sound so concerned. It’s nothing to do with your situation.”</p><p>Oliver doesn’t humour her efforts to prolong the call. “What is it, Annabelle?”</p><p>“I need a favour,” she says finally, her tone carefully blank. “Not now. But eventually.”</p><p>“Oh, Christ our Lord,” Oliver groans. Then: “What’s in it for me?”</p><p>“It’s nothing big. Not at all. Just a small favour.”</p><p>“So I don’t get anything in return?” </p><p>There’s a pause as Annabelle thinks. Ella Fitzgerald sings <i>When I’m alone and blue as can be</i> in the background of the call, and like she’s been reminded, Annabelle says, “You can have your record player back.”</p><p>“I don’t want my record player back.” Oliver doesn’t need to serve the Eye to know that his old record player has been absolutely filled with spiders by now. “Listen,” he says. “I’ll do your favour. You can tie your threads anywhere you like. Just don’t...Just keep your hands off my situation.”</p><p>Annabelle’s reply is softly amused at how he’s picked up her wording. “Your situation?”</p><p>“Yes.” Oliver turns on his side in his bed, cups the phone to his ear crossly. “Assuming you haven’t already caught me up in it for some grand scheme you have.”</p><p>“Really, Oliver,” she laughs. “Don’t blame me for every hopeless decision you make. I have close to no interest in your love life.”</p><p>“I don’t have a love life,” Oliver counters. “But please. No spiders in his coffee or anything.“</p><p>“I have close to no interest in your tender bromance,” Annabelle corrects herself. “Thank you, Oliver.” She hangs up with a click.</p><p>He shoves his phone under his pillow after that, pulls the covers up and tries to get back to sleep, but his brain is already up and running a mile a minute. Instead he lies in his bed and watches the white of the ceiling until it crawls over with dark tendrils. He blinks four times in rapid succession and they disappear.</p><p>.</p><p>It takes about three months for disaster to strike. The sun is setting on the day when Oliver wakes up from his nap and leaves the house for a grocery run. Not that he needs groceries, or that he needed the nap, either, but he appreciates the little ritualistic bits of humanity he can oblige. Once, he’d wondered if he still needed to brush his teeth, or if the End would smite the bacteria before he got plaque. He hasn’t tested his hypothesis yet.</p><p>He’s done well, the past few months. Doesn’t let his thoughts wander where they shouldn’t. He’s a force to be reckoned with when focused on a goal, and for now he has set himself on feeding his god fuller than he ever has before. Death is everywhere, so none of his work is particularly hard. </p><p>If he is very intent on deluding himself, he could even say he’s forgotten. So it’s understandable that when he turns the corner into the dairy aisle, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and sees a very familiar man in a faded band t-shirt browsing the milks every undead cell in his body surges into panic mode. </p><p>He recoils at a speed that sends his heel into the lowest shelf of biscuits, all previous drowsiness evaporating in an instant. A packet crunches from the impact; Oliver hisses out a breath in surprise even as he backpedals desperately into the aisle he came from. Gerard Keay looks up from the expiry date printed on the carton he‘s holding, face luminous and baffled in the cold of the freezer. Oliver is, predictably, too slow.</p><p>“Oliver?” He says Oliver’s name like he can’t believe his luck. “Hey, hey, wait!”</p><p>Oliver does not wait. Instead he turns and breaks into a full-on sprint past rows of chocolate digestives. He reaches the end of the aisle and flings himself around the corner of the next in a bid to lose Gerry. He’s never been fast, by any standards, having spent most his school years courting string instruments and being inexplicably sick on track meet days, but it does also help that Oliver has not been technically human for years and has thus transcended beyond the petty intricacies of cell respiration.</p><p>Behind him, he can hear the clomp of unwieldy boots as Gerry gives chase. Oliver can’t imagine that it’s easy to run in them. Sure enough, by the third aisle he can’t hear Gerry behind him and he slows his pace in a careless lapse of judgment. He ducks into an aisle perpendicular to the freezers. Gerry is standing at the end of it, milk carton still hanging from his fingers, hair standing up like he’s dug his hands through its length. </p><p>Oliver swears (<i>damn</i> these Beholding types!) and turns on his heel so fast he nearly falls over. Gerry starts a “Wait, no—“, but Oliver is out of the aisle before he can finish his sentence.</p><p>He runs through aisles populated by a few shoppers. Most of them pretend not to notice him as he books it toward where he thinks the exit is, but it seems to have inexplicably teleported itself as far away as possible. He finds himself in front of fridges full of seafood, lobsters backed up against some deep corner of the supermarket, retraces his steps and is suddenly in the ice cream section. He remembers then that ice cream was, in fact, what he came to buy, so he gives the freezer door a perfunctory yank, sticks a tub of peanut butter chocolate under his arm, and resumes his escape.</p><p>Mid-way to the delicatessen he is pretty sure is by the exit he finally thinks to wonder what the hell Gerry is doing in this specific Tesco. There’s plenty of other supermarkets near the apartment, and Oliver’d been very careful not to pick Gerry a place too near to his own. But he supposes it doesn’t matter. Stupid, he thinks to himself. That he’d thought that Gerry would be a zoo tiger, stuck tracing the same stubborn routes around the enclosure of that neigbourhood. He’s free to frequent any Tesco he prefers to. Although it would make Oliver’s life much less complicated if he never frequented this one in particular.</p><p>His thoughts are stopped short by the calamity of the man himself standing further ahead of his path. Gerry is breathing hard, like he’s run to get there, and Oliver thinks again with exasperation that this convenient Knowing is hardly fucking fair. His eyes wheel around the shelves for anything, emergency exits or evacuation routes, but before he can cut and run Gerry says, with a note of desperation, “Oliver, please,” and all the flight turns to vapour in Oliver’s veins. “Just—I mean, I get it if you don’t want to talk to me, just give me ten seconds.” He breathes in, deep enough that his shoulders rise with it. </p><p>Oliver’s feet have finally gone still. He can’t bring himself to look away, so he studies the colour in Gerry’s cheeks, the blazer draped around his shoulders like a velvet blanket. Gerry’s pulled his hair up into a bun and speared it with what looks like a thin switchblade. His dye job, however, is as bad as ever.</p><p>Gerry is still figuring out the words, and he starts with a “You don’t—“ but scraps it halfway, blurts out instead, “I dream about you,” in the heated rush of a confession. He’s wide-eyed, doesn’t quite look like he knows what to do with his hands. He digs them into his pockets as a solution. “Every night,” he adds quietly, never flinching from the contact of Oliver’s eyes on him.</p><p>“These are <i>literally</i> my boxer shorts,” Oliver exclaims in lieu of any meaningful reply. “They look just decent enough that I can wear them out for like, groceries, it’s why I bought them, but. But, I was hoping,” he cuts himself short before he can start proper rambling. If he had blood, his face would be volcanically hot. “That we could have this significant confrontation when I don’t have <i>killer whales</i> over my <i>dick</i>.”</p><p>Naturally, Gerry’s gaze drifts downwards. Oliver might well be the densest man alive. “Are they killer whales?” he asks, amazed. “No, I love your pants, this is absurd. You were running from me because you’re in your <i>pyjamas</i>?” He smiles, incredulous, and Oliver feels it like a blow. “You know you don’t need to put on a three-piece and your Sunday shoes to hear me tell you that you haunt me literally every time I go to sleep.”</p><p>“No, I really do,” Oliver objects. “I was hoping to break out my good tie for the occasion.”</p><p>“Were you?” Gerry‘s closed the distance between them, and now he’s close enough that Oliver could reach out and touch him if he wanted. “Hoping.” He doesn’t elaborate, but Oliver knows what he’s asking.</p><p>“Yes,” says Oliver, and he’s surprised when he realises it’s true. “I was. Though I don’t think I noticed until now.” It was there, that frivolous wish, underneath everything he occupied himself with to try to forget. “Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure I said it myself. That I’d see you again.”</p><p>“I thought it meant you’d see me when I died again and you came to pick me up.”</p><p>“I’m not the grim reaper, Gerry,” Oliver reminds him gently. </p><p>“You wouldn’t have made the exception?” Gerry jokes. “Even if you’re no Charon, you could drop by. Let me know when my time‘s on the horizon.”</p><p>Oliver’s smile is wry. “From my experience, people don’t appreciate when I prophesy their deaths.”</p><p>“Oh, no, I’m nothing like them,” says Gerry quickly. “You can prophesy my death any day, sir.”</p><p>Oliver laughs at that, a shy, unexpected bloom of amusement. He looks Gerry in the eye for a brief second and has to look away almost immediately, acting very interested in the hams in the honeyed light of their display. He’s silent for a while, still quietly buoyed by the impossibility of their situation. “I don’t dream of you, not anymore.”</p><p>“Hmm,” Gerry breathes. “Is that good?”</p><p>(For years he’d walked the same circles around Gerard Keay’s facsimile, tucked within the hold of black roots, nursed in the literary center of threads and tireless script, tiny handwriting almost like print. On the bad days the tendrils would yield just the slightest, and the pale, glass-eyed face of a dead man would breach their grip to remind Oliver that somewhere there was a boy in a book who would not die and could not live. For all the nightmares he‘d floated through unmoored, he’d hated that one with a particular strength.) “Yes,” Oliver says without hesitation. Then, because he’s feeling just a little bit bold, Oliver cocks his head and meets Gerry’s gaze. “I like the real thing better.”</p><p>Gerry sucks in his lower lip to stop the smile from spreading across the entirety of his face. “I think I left my basket back there,” he says, putting their tryst in the middle of the supermarket to bed neatly. “Give me a moment.”</p><p>They drop by the dairy aisle again to pick his things up. Oliver finally thinks to ask the more pressing questions. “What are you doing here?” He watches Gerry swap one of his cartons for another with a later expiry date. </p><p>“Good to see you, too,” Gerry says archly and takes up his basket.</p><p>“That’s hardly what I mean and you know it.”</p><p>Gerry is relentless. “These are very soothing words from the man who ran away from me à la horror movie,” he replies with exaggerated hurt. </p><p>“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” Oliver says. “I just mean I haven’t seen you around here before. It’s a little far. That is, if you’re still staying at...”</p><p>“Of course I am,” Gerry says. After a long, embarrassed second, he adds, “Thank you.”</p><p>“For not letting you rest in peace?”</p><p>“For all of it.” Gerry drifts to the cashier, Oliver close behind. “Between you and me, Oliver, I’m still confused. Nice house for a resurrected man hardly generates any fear revenue, does it?”</p><p>“You’re avoiding the question,” Oliver tells him, well aware that he’s doing the exact same.</p><p>Gerry, too, is aware. “Thou hypocrite,” he quotes loftily. “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye.” The line for the cashier is sparse at this time of day, and they pay for their groceries one by one. Oliver’s through first, and he reads the sordid allegations printed danger-yellow on the tabloids by the counter while he waits. He’s put two and two together and made something close to four by the time Gerry joins him, tote full of groceries in tow.</p><p>“You make a statement?” is his guess. By the way that Gerry’s eyebrows go up, he knows he’s right. </p><p>“Yeah,” Gerry confirms. “Not today, though. That was a week ago. I‘m back here now because I was just at the hospital.”</p><p>Something in Oliver’s chest constricts with worry. It’s instantaneous and it leaves him monumentally bewildered. “You’re alright?”</p><p>“I’m fine. Y’know, I don’t think I’m all human anymore, which isn’t surprising—anyway, I was visiting.” They step out into the night air and dither at the bus stop just outside the supermarket, each staring overhead at their own personal sets of stars. “The Archivist. He’s proper dead.”</p><p>“I heard.” Oliver slants a look at Gerry through the corner of his eye. His eyes are fixed on the black expanse of night, face touched by Midas in the slick sodium of the street light. The twin studs bracketing his eyebrow glint like miniature planets.</p><p>“If you look at the little screen with his vitals it’s like...like straight line city,” Gerry continues. “But he doesn’t rot. And they still visit him.” He punctuates his last word with a huff of a disbelieving laugh. </p><p>“I take it you ran into someone.” </p><p>“This one bloke. Looked a lot like Paddington Bear. Got rather shirty with me when I showed up.” Gerry raises his voice to what Oliver assumes is an imitation of the Paddington man. “All <i>Why are you here</i> and <i>Aren’t you dead?</i>”</p><p>“Aren’t you?” Oliver bumps his shoulder up against Gerry’s conspiratorially. “Gerry Keay of the great archival fame.”</p><p>“Not so great, if they didn’t spread the news of my return the instant I showed up in their institute.” </p><p>“God forbid they don’t yearn daily for the resurrection of their favourite mythic goth.”</p><p>“Yeah, God forbid. Come to think of it, the lady who took my statement did not seem chuffed to see me in the flesh.”</p><p>“Cryptozoologists hate him,” Oliver quips. Gerry snorts.</p><p>This time when he glances over, Gerry is already looking, and they both look away, caught in the act. There’s a strange warmth to the contact of sight. In the distance, a red double-decker is impending, lit from the inside with some civic sanctuary. </p><p>“Come back to my place?” Oliver says on impulse.</p><p>“Sure,” Gerry replies, deliberately casual.</p><p>At Oliver’s flat they’re a four-legged manticore of a pair. Somewhere on the bus journey Oliver had mentioned offhand the state of his temperature post-mortem, and now Gerry is pressed to Oliver’s side like an envelope to a chest, artifact of warmth against Oliver’s own unwavering cold, his own personal lightless flame. Oliver is a tall man, but Gerry has three inches of platform sole to his advantage, and his breath heats the air beside Oliver’s neck, torments Oliver’s nerve endings as he tries to make his fingers hold his keys at the correct angle.</p><p>It’s laughable how out of practice he is. His last boyfriend was years ago; his situation doesn’t exactly help to foster any spark. Except it does, clearly, because Gerry nudges him ineffectually and says, “You’ve got to invite me in. Undead creature, remember?”</p><p>“Oh, you and me both.” To Oliver’s ears his own voice is nigh the pitch of a rabbit being very slowly strangled by a snare. He finally, finally, fits the correct key in the lock and turns. “In you go.”</p><p>Gerry steps into the apartment. Oliver turns the light on in the hallway to see by and fights to not be vexed with the abruptness of his solitude. Still, he could surfeit on the universe of Gerry’s back for a lifetime, a view rendered in black lines and angled limbs. Gerry drops his groceries on the coffee table, drifts to run his gaze over the quartz on the bookshelf, the Coates with the lines down the spine beyond it. Oliver‘s soul on a plinth.</p><p>“Whose mandible is this?” Gerry’s query comes after a minute or so of quiet. Oliver, peering into his fridge with half-interest, shuts its door in confoundment. The tarot card magneted to it falls face up, the painful cliche of the grinning horseman looking outward.</p><p>He joins Gerry by the shelf. “I genuinely don’t know. Might have been from the Turner. Might have been from my old job.”</p><p>“There’s a lot to unpack about what you just said,” Gerry notes weakly. “It’s a little bit big, isn’t it?”</p><p>Oliver raises it side by side with Gerry’s face. Gerry opens his mouth gamely for comparison. “You’re right, it is kind of oversized.” With a rush of something close to heat Oliver notices the piercing through his tongue. “Is that new?”</p><p>“This?” Gerry says as best as he can with his tongue stuck out. ”Yeah. It got infected last month, but it’s fine now.”</p><p>“Gross.” Oliver sets the mandible back down on the shelf. “How did you eat?”</p><p>“Painfully,” Gerry confesses. “Actually, after a few days of it I just didn’t. And I never got properly hungry. I kind of...kept going.” He hooks his thumb into the pocket of the blazer. “Never mind that, though. You met the Boneturner?”</p><p>Oliver grimaces. “Once. We’re not mates or anything.”</p><p>“Hey, why not?” Gerry says. “You should call him. Go out for drinks.”</p><p>“Hard pass.”</p><p>Gerry smiles, a quick, private thing that tilts the corners of his eyes up. This close, Oliver can see the red smudged methodically along his lash line. He wonders if the look Gerry is going for is fresh-out-the-losing-end-of-a-pub-brawl. He wonders why he finds it so inexplicably disarming.</p><p>They stand in companionable silence, shoulder to shoulder, surveying the trinkets Oliver has accumulated steadily over the years. Somewhere in Oliver’s diminutive Alexandria there’s probably a Leitner tome, only minorly malevolent, still with the fluorescent sale sticker on the paperback cover. The books themselves are safe behind the front lines of crystals and receipts and vinyl records. Gerry is eyeing one particular slip of printed paper, printed over with Oliver’s own cursive handwriting; mathematical estimations of his monthly light bill.</p><p>Oliver has seen the inside of his place an infinity of times. Still, it’s like the interior has been reborn different under the watchful weight of Gerry’s eyes. This twice-dead man is an apparition in velvet, giving off his own light, sacrosanct. Everything he looks at turning itself over and being made new. </p><p>It’s hard, for Oliver to draw the damning connecting line between this Gerry and the one caught like a moth in his dreams. This Gerry with the easy, wounding smile, ineffably funny in the strangest of circumstances. That Gerry, eyes misted over, calcified, mouth parted on a silent syllable. Oliver really does like the real thing better.</p><p>“I don’t regret what I did,” says Oliver. “Even if it’s selfish of me.”</p><p>It’s as vague of an admission as they come, but as always, Gerry Knows his meaning. It’s a long while before he speaks. Oliver is about to follow up with some hurried justification when Gerry finally says something. “Did you know,” he starts, with a note in his voice that promises a story. “My neighbour down the corridor has a dog. Some kind of terrier. It is so high-strung, you’d think it ate something radioactive.</p><p>“Every time it sees me it barks at me like I’ve committed some terrible crime against it, which, I’ll have you know, I have not,” he continues, glances over to Oliver. Oliver is transfixed. “Sometimes when I look out the window I can see my neighbour walking it in the street below. Just this tiny Chinese lady being pulled along by her madman of a dog.</p><p>“And,” Gerry says, a little winded, “The couple just across has a kid who’s just learning how to walk. Has the hang of it already, really. And the other day we were all in the elevator at the same time, me and the lady and the dog and the parents with their toddler. The second the baby waddled into the lift the dog went still, like someone hit pause on its video. The kid went right up to it, because, fuck, kids don’t know things. The parents looked at me so helplessly you would’ve thought I was Cesar Millan.</p><p>“But the dog was stiller than I’d ever seen it. Every other second of its life it’d been running on pure energy like a dog-shaped chunk of uranium. But not then. The kid reached out to pet it and it sat down obligingly, its tiny little tail thumping against the floor of the lift like all its energy had concentrated right at that singular point.” Gerry runs a hand across the back of his neck, expression pinched but fond at the memory. “It was ridiculous. If I filmed it I think I could’ve sold the video to some TV program for some serious cash. I tried not to be kind of offended, but this absolute wanker of a dog has barked at me. Every. Single. Time I have seen it.</p><p>“Anyway. My point is that,” Gerry turns to Oliver bodily, “I don’t regret losing that game either. It was the best thing to happen to me since Gertrude Robinson killed my mother.”</p><p>Oliver tries his best, but it isn’t enough. The surprised laugh slips out of him. “Sorry, sorry.” Still he can’t fight down the smile.</p><p>“Don’t be,” Gerry assures him. They regard each other for a charged second and look chastely away, the same routine of dancing around the conundrum that has carved itself out between them.</p><p>“You kept it,” Oliver says finally. It’s a non-sequitur, but he can’t summon the kind of words that could justly follow what Gerry has told him. Instead he reaches out, brushes imaginary dust from the velvet blazer draped over Gerry’s shoulders. His hand stills beside Gerry’s collarbone. “The jacket.”</p><p>“Did you think I was going to pitch it into the Thames the first chance I got?” Gerry asks. </p><p>“I dunno, maybe?” Oliver feels like a fool and a half. “It’s nice on you.”</p><p>Gerry’s hand closes over Oliver’s, but only to take it from his chest and guide it to his side. He shrugs the blazer off. “It’s nicer on you,” Gerry says like a secret. He slings the blazer over Oliver’s shoulders, catches its collar with two hands, and kisses Oliver gently on the mouth.</p><p>It suffuses Oliver through with that heat-adjacent feeling, that odd racing of a non-heartbeat. It’s a hard-knock afterlife. When the critical thought hits his brain again like a high-speed road accident he shuts his eyes and leans into it, tilts his head and kisses back. His hand flies up nearly to the side of Gerry’s face, but he drops it self-consciously, dithers it in open space.</p><p>They break for air, Gerry still clinging to the collar of Oliver’s blazer for dear life. Oliver’s lips part on a quip that he can’t gather enough brain cells to formulate. “Hey,” he says instead, like the absolute airhead he is at his core. “Hi.” </p><p>“Hi yourself,” Gerry says back, because, apparently, they are both airheads.</p><p>They crash back into each other, moving aimlessly as one entity, pressed flush together so that their clumsy dance from bookshelf to wall almost has Oliver twist his ankle on nothing. Gerry steps blindly and Oliver shifts back in response, a curious, makeshift waltz. He opens his mouth against Gerry’s and Gerry’s breath fans in, sweetly warm. His back touches the wall where Gerry, unbelievably, has guided him to sightless.</p><p>Gerry, triumphant, gives Oliver’s bottom lip a last nip before he moves down, gets his teeth on the soft beneath Oliver’s jawbone. Oliver swears as the cold steel through Gerry’s tongue touches his neck. “Gerard Keay, I do not want your tongue infection germs—oh, fuck,” he hisses as Gerry drives his back flat against the wall.</p><p>“‘S healed, you big baby,” Gerry murmurs against Oliver’s jugular. The shiver that passes through Oliver is like nothing he’s felt in years. “I had to gargle saline solution for a week.”</p><p>Oliver huffs. “This is the worst dirty talk I have ever been subjected to in my life.”</p><p>“Not your life. We’re both dead, remember?”</p><p>“Smartass.” Oliver peers down at Gerry’s dark head, the browner roots coming up like daisies through the asphalt. Mindlessly he reaches a hand up and pulls the switchblade from where it’s keeping Gerry’s hair in its bun. He flicks it closed for safety’s sake.</p><p>Gerry squints up at him when he notices. He’s a sight, hair loose to frame his face, eyebrows knitted prettily. He blows one wisp of dyed black out of his eyes. “What’d you do that for?”</p><p>“I like it down,” Oliver tells him. It’s dim, their faces lit only by the distant light of the corridor, but Oliver thinks it isn’t his imagination when Gerry goes quite visibly red. He reaches up to tuck a strand behind Gerry’s ear. Wordlessly Gerry turns his head to press a kiss to the inside of Oliver’s wrist.</p><p>Gerry straightens and they find each other again, and this time Oliver’s hand cups Gerry’s face, tangles in his hair. The studs above and below Gerry’s eyebrow are points of grounding contact between their temples, where Oliver’s forehead meets Gerry’s. His fingers twist in the hair at the nape of Gerry’s neck. </p><p>When they pull back, breathing hard, Oliver says the first thing on his mind. “Why is your hair crunchy?”</p><p>Gerry sputters in indignation. “It’s a three-pound dye job, what were you expecting?”</p><p>Oliver gives Gerry’s hair an experimental yank where he’s still holding it. Gerry’s head lolls back obligingly with his hand. “I was not expecting it to have the texture of raffia.”</p><p>“You’re hurting my feelings,” Gerry says, wounded. Oliver breathes out a laugh and musses the top of Gerry’s head into disarray.</p><p>“I love men with crunchy hair,” Oliver teases. “I think it’s sexy how you could probably film those ASMR videos with it.”</p><p>When they’ve kissed themselves to exhaustion they adjourn to the kitchen, and Oliver finally turns the lights on to see by in the growing dark. On the counter there is a familiar butter-yellow record player, <i>Ella and Basie!</i> vinyl already poised to play within. He checks inside the case and under the disc but finds nothing arachnoid, so he sets it to play with an exasperated sort of fondness. Close to no interest in my love life/tender bromance, Oliver recalls tetchily as the record spins the warmth of jazz. </p><p>Gerry, meanwhile, is surveying the contents of the fridge. Oliver notices that the Death card has been pinned to its door again and smiles to himself. “Do you want anything for dinner?” he asks.</p><p>“I’d love an omelette,” Gerry admits. They work together, Gerry fetching the salts and spatulas and delivering them to Oliver’s waiting hand, relieving him of empty eggshells diligently. When they’re done they split the egg between the two of them and eat it right there in the kitchen, Gerry perched on the counter, Oliver leaning against the fridge.</p><p>Neither of them can dance, but when Oliver offers his hand Gerry gamely lets himself be pulled to his feet. They try their best, sway and turn haltingly to the helium lift of Armstrong trumpet, Gerry’s left hand on the small of Oliver’s back and the fingers of their other hands linked. More than once they confuse their feet with the other’s, trip backwards into the cupboard. They pull each other back up no matter how many times their rhythm spells accident. Float left, then right, to the lull of <i>Stars fading, but I linger on, dear,</i> and <i>Dream a little dream of me</i>. It’s a sweet song, but in Oliver’s case he really would prefer not to.</p><p>The album spins itself to completion and they creep out of the flat to the night in the corridor outside to see if they can spot any stars (they can’t, what with the clouds, but it’s alright), break into the permafrost of Oliver’s tub of peanut butter and chocolate (Gerry isn’t a fan).  They take it slow, put something on, except Oliver only pays for the channels that screen the horrible reality TV he craves and they end up glued together on the sofa, greatly invested in the love lives of strangers.</p><p>A beginning, thinks Oliver later on in the night. For once. Too long he has been a demigod of denouement, eating endings whole. It’s a blessed relief to concern himself with something other than conclusion for once. If his heart could beat, it would be beating its quisling pattern, and if he could put that pattern into words, he would have sonnets for centuries to come. Instead he kisses every inked eye up Gerry’s spine in turn, meandering upwards on that highland of vertebrae; listens to Gerry’s breath in the darkness and feels more human than he has in a long time. Begins.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>do you every trick yourself into becoming completely utterly ride or die for a ship........because hahah..i do that</p><p>am on tumblr @bdhead if you would like to drop a review there instead of here!</p>
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